Russo’s version of the good old-fashioned comic novel is the gold standard, full of heart and dexterous storytelling.
Back to North Bath, New York, for a third round of misadventures, tomfoolery, and personal growth.
The demise of Donald “Sully” Sullivan, Russo’s beloved main character, in Everybody's Fool (2016), is no obstacle to the success of the author's return visit to the benighted North Bath, though at its opening the town is put out of its misery by being officially dissolved, its environs annexed to its bright and shiny neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Despite his death, Sully casts a long shadow over the doings of the remaining population: Peter, his college professor son; Rub, his old sidekick; Chief of Police Douglas Raymer, his erstwhile nemesis; Ruth, his longtime paramour—all constantly find themselves recalling his instructions and example. Though the closing of the North Bath police department puts Raymer out of a job, when a body is found at the long-shuttered Sans Souci hotel, he is sent to investigate by his former employee and on-again, off-again girlfriend: the new chief of police of Schuyler Springs, Charice Bond. Charice is attractive and Black, while middle-aged Raymer looks like “he and the Pillsbury Doughboy might have a common ancestor,” but Charice’s twin brother, Jerome, is on hand to teach Raymer a few things he needs to know about the Black experience. In other news, a third generation of Sullivan shows up in town—Peter's son Thomas, from whom he has been long estranged. Thomas looks a lot like his brother Will, the only one of the boys Peter raised, now abroad on a Fulbright scholarship as a result of advantages that Thomas and his younger brother lacked and about which they are bitterly resentful. Another three-generation plotline involves the thorny relationships among Ruth, her daughter, Janey, and her granddaughter, Tina. Bad cops, bigotry, partner violence, nefarious schemes, and confusing therapy sessions aside, almost all of the characters experience significant improvements in their self-concepts, relationships, and circumstances. The king is dead, long live the king!
Russo’s version of the good old-fashioned comic novel is the gold standard, full of heart and dexterous storytelling.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780593317891
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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